Running Away
by Kilerkki
Summary: If another fool at the missions desk gave Raidou another mission, it'd be the one from which he'd never come back. Raidou, Genma, and the grief that breaks a man. [Oneshot]


Running Away

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For a deeper discussion of the reasons and reasoning behind this story, please visit my livejournal (link through my user profile) and the entry of January 11th, 2007. In brief, theorizing about the future of the characters in the Scarlet Spiral universe led to a fic which explores less of the future and more of the nature of grief and loss. The background for this story is, therefore, very Spiral-centric; check the link on my profile page for further info.

Characterizations of Genma and Suzume (who appears in canon as a kunoichi Academy teacher) are borrowed strongly from their depictions by Nezuko and sna at Scarlet Spiral. Great thanks go to Phoenix of Eternity for beta-reading!

This fic is set approximately three years before the start of the _Naruto _series, and seven years after the Scarlet Spiral RPG. Genma is twenty-seven; Raidou is twenty-nine.

-

Five days after the funeral, Genma picked the lock and let himself in. His footsteps rang unnaturally loud on the polished wooden floors, and it seemed to take a very long time to cross the empty front room, with wilting flowers on the coffee table and pictures smiling accusingly from the walls. There was a covered casserole on the kitchen counter. It was cold, and smelled a little.

The shards of a broken coffee cup lay on the floor in a pool of brownish stain, already dry. Genma skirted the spilled coffee, glanced in the sink. Another old coffee cup, the hard-water stains of a sink that hadn't been scrubbed in days.

He called, very softly, "Raidou?"

He hadn't expected an answer; he wasn't surprised when only a fly's dying buzzing filled the house's silence. The tiny noise was _something, _at least. In five years, he couldn't remember this house silent, ever. There'd been her laughter, and Raidou's; there'd been parties, game-nights, dinners. More than a few times he'd staggered here first after a mission; he'd bled on the table, on the sofa, in the shower. He'd long ago lost count of the number of nights he'd crashed here, after a mission or a party or just a very bad day, and lain awake in the spare room listening to a muted murmur of voices and squeak of springs as Raidou and his wife made love…

Genma turned away, trailing his fingers along the wall under the black-banded portrait that hung just outside the kitchen, and kept looking.

The room that would have been the baby's was empty, too. Dust greyed the slats of the crib; a half-knitted blanket lay abandoned on the seat of a chair. The plush teddy bear in the crib had fallen on its face, as if it had grown tired of waiting. Genma picked it up and set it upright again. He had bought that bear for the first baby, the day after a delirious Raidou had shared the news. Far too early, of course, and maybe it'd been a bad omen, a bright hope karma couldn't let grow.

She'd lost that baby, a year and a half ago. And the next, a month ago. And now…

He closed the door very carefully behind him, and went on.

The door to the main bedroom was closed, as he had expected. It was unlocked, which he had not expected, and he paused for a moment with the tips of his fingers on the doorknob. He could hear nothing.

For one gut-wrenching moment, his memory got the better of him. That day when Kakashi'd found him in the ANBU gym and told him that Raidou'd been brought back, was in surgery, was in critical condition, wasn't expected to make it. That dark cell in Heigen Castle, after an ANBU assassination gone horribly wrong, when he'd lain chained on the damp stone floor listening to Raidou die. That morning he'd found Raidou face-down in an icy shower, flashbacking to the mission where he'd lost half his face, so still that at first Genma'd thought—

He shook his head, banishing those thoughts as best he could, and opened the door.

The bed was unmade, and Raidou wasn't in it, and that in itself was enough to make Genma's heart skip a hammering beat.

It wasn't that Raidou was neurotic about cleanliness, exactly. He was perfectly fine on a mission, and he didn't have the slightest objection to getting filthy and bloody (as most of his missions tended to go), and he'd even drink from a shared canteen. But he _did _scrub the grout in his bathroom with a toothbrush, the way you were probably supposed to but nobody else in Genma's experience ever did. He _did _dust every conceivable surface at least once a week, when he wasn't on a mission. And he _always _made his bed the moment after he got up, so tightly that you could bounce a shuriken off the blankets. (Genma'd tried once, when they were next-door neighbors in ANBU HQ; Raidou had not been amused.)

He skirted the big bed, noting the fading dents in the right pillow the way he noticed the stained towel crumpled near the entrance to the bathroom. Nothing else in the world was quite the same color as drying blood.

The last time he'd seen Raidou leave a towel discarded like that, Genma'd been twenty-two and cleaning up after a spectacularly bloody mission to Tanzuka. That mission had been the last they took together before Raidou left ANBU, and in a reversal of their usual procedure Raidou'd been the one to eliminate the target. She'd been a pretty girl, eighteen or so, whose only crime had been choosing one lover and spurning another who had the means and the malice to hire Konoha's best. And so Raidou'd killed her, and three weeks later he'd married another pretty girl with all her heart in her eyes and all her future in his hands.

They would have celebrated their fifth anniversary this spring, when the sakura were in bloom. She would have been twenty-two.

On the other side of the bed was a dresser, carefully littered with lotion and make-up and hair-care bottles. Raidou must have had a hand in arranging them, because they were ordered by size instead of by product. His own gear was neatly displayed in a rack on top of the chest against the far wall. Pouches of kunai and shuriken, rolls of wire and explosive notes, a sheathed sword, a spare vest. There was a gap where a kunai holster should have been; he couldn't tell if anything else was missing.

The sliding door on the far wall led outside, to an open back porch and a tiny strip of garden. Genma slipped through the door, shut it behind him, and turned, shoving his hands in his pockets, to stare quietly down at the man lying supine on the polished boards of the porch.

After a moment he said, both because it was true and because it was what Raidou would've said, "You look like hell."

Raidou's shoulders shifted slightly. He'd tucked his hands behind his head, and he lay staring up at the cloudy sky like Nara Shikaku's boy on a lazy day. There was a bottle of shouchuu on the edge of the porch, just within arm's reach, but the seal was unbroken, and if there was a drug fogging Raidou's dark, shadowed eyes, it wasn't alcohol.

He was in uniform again, and if he had any new bandages they were hidden beneath long sleeves and dark pants. The high collars of shirt and vest shadowed the map of scars writhing down his neck, though nothing but an ANBU mask could hide the scars on his cheek.

Raidou'd left the ANBU five years ago, when he'd married. There shouldn't be any reason to think of masks now; only scars and memories and a few pages in Genma's photo albums recorded those years. Shouldn't be, if Raidou weren't just that kind of idiot...

"I talked with Hokage-sama," Genma said at last, leaning against one of the pillars of the porch. "You're suspended indefinitely." No point in mentioning the strings he'd pulled, the arguments he'd used, the fists planted on the Hokage's desk and the hissed warning: _"This one was a B-rank, and he barely came back. Hell, she'd been ashes ten hours, and he was already in line at the missions desk. You're willing to bet his life on the next? _I'm_ damn well not." _

Seven years ago and more, when Raidou's scars had still been raw and fresh, ANBU Intel had hauled him down for review on charges of attempted mission suicide. Genma'd been more furious then than at any other time in his life. He'd been on one of those missions gone-to-hell; he'd waited by a comatose Raidou's hospital bed for weeks after another. He'd _seen_ Raidou fight for life more fiercely than any other man fought for anything, and he'd heard that whispered promise: _"I come back. I always come back."_

So what could he do now, when Raidou was letting the fight slip through his fingers, when Genma knew with a sickening certainty that if another fool at the missions desk gave Raidou another mission, it'd be the one from which he'd never come back?

"I'm on babysitting duty," he said, and gods it hurt, to fill his voice with scorn instead of sympathy. But Raidou's hair-trigger temper had always made him easy to goad, easy to push from melancholy into fury; he'd used the same tactics on Genma time and again, since that first night when Genma'd woken from screaming nightmares to catch a flashlight pitched at his head. Raidou'd understood grief, but he hadn't had much patience for it. Shinobi lived and shinobi died, and the world moved on, and Raidou had moved with it.

Now Raidou didn't move. Genma watched for the old muscle twitch at the side of his jaw, the betrayal of a burning temper barely held in check. He might as well have been watching a corpse. Raidou barely even breathed.

"All right," Genma said, very quietly, after what seemed like half an eternity. He pushed away from the pillar, stooped down, scooped up the bottle of shouchuu. Expensive stuff, Grass Country import, the type Genma only bought for special occasions. He doubted that Raidou was interested so much in the taste as in the proof, but what kind of sign was it when the seal wasn't even broken?

Probably a bad one, he decided, and took the bottle with him as he went into the house to dump a bloody towel in the laundry and scrub a stained kitchen floor.

-

Suzume came over that afternoon, with a stack of covered bowls in her arms and an anxious look quickly replaced by bewilderment when Genma opened the door. "They said he was back," she said, eyes flicking to the empty room behind Genma and then back up to his face. "Is…How is he?"

Genma shrugged and rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. "He's out on the porch. Was half an hour ago, at any rate. He wouldn't eat any lunch." Wouldn't acknowledge Genma's existence, or the smell of the onigiri Genma'd placed enticingly by the door, or the impact when Genma'd thrown one of the rice balls at him fifteen minutes later. He was probably still lying out there with rice all over his chest.

Suzume's lips thinned. "_Wouldn't _he." She hefted the bowls in her arms, thoughtfully. "Right. In that case, help yourself."

He dropped the dusting rag just in time to catch the tower of bowls. Suzume stalked past him, pausing only to kick off her sandals at the door. She made a face at the portrait in the kitchen hallway as she passed.

She'd been Raidou's lover, once, Genma recalled. His genin teammate before that, his only surviving friend from before the age of seventeen. There'd been a time when half of ANBU had expected that Raidou would marry Suzume. _He _hadn't, of course, because—well, because he'd known Raidou, and because in those days he'd been stupid enough to hope…

He grimaced at the bowls and carried them to the counter. He could hear Suzume's voice, very faintly, through doors and walls; she wasn't quite yelling yet, though he had no doubt she'd get there. Raidou had told him once that on the afternoon their genin team had met for the first time, she'd tried to set his hair on fire; their relationship hadn't changed a great deal since.

The first night Raidou and Genma had met, Raidou'd thrown a flashlight at Genma's head, and Genma'd thrown his own broken flashlight right back, and somehow Raidou had ended up singing him to sleep. _Ninja's Passing, _a song Genma couldn't hear now without hearing Raidou's strong baritone softly singing along.

He whispered the words to himself, there in the kitchen. "_My lover puts a knife to wrist, says tomorrow comes, hold on a while…_"

No knives at Raidou's wrists; the days of mistakes purged with blood had died with the White Fang. And Raidou was shinobi to the bone. He wouldn't kill himself. But he wouldn't save himself, either, not if he felt there was nothing left worth fighting for…

The counter cracked. Genma lurched away, swearing. Five deep fingerprints marred the cheap plastic laminate, and a jagged crack ran halfway to the wall. Dammit, how'd he lost control of his chakra like that? _Raidou_ was the one who accidentally splintered bridge railings and punched holes through walls. Just like he was going to punch a hole through Genma, when he found this.

At the moment, Genma could almost welcome the prospect.

"Damn," he said, ineffectively, and tried to push the counter back together. No dice. Well, there had to be a counter-repairman somewhere in Konoha, and it wasn't like he'd smashed the cabinets anyway. He could probably get it fixed before Raidou even left the porch.

He desperately hoped he couldn't.

Suzume's voice rose suddenly from the other side of the house, sharp and furious. "Don't you _dare _ignore me, Namaishi Raidou. _Look _at me, damn you! I swear, I'm—" Her voice dropped again, into an angry muttering he couldn't quite make out. He wondered if she really would set fire to Raidou's hair, or vest, or feet, and if even that could make him stir.

He told himself he wouldn't envy Suzume, if she could do it.

The dust-rag was still lying crumpled by the door, where he'd dropped it when Suzume entered. He retrieved it, swiped it over the top of the doorway, and retreated back to the kitchen. After four hours of work, the house was about as clean as Raidou had kept it. Genma didn't ever waste this kind of effort on his own apartment; usually he hired a team of genin for a D-rank mission at about the point the dust-balls started mutating. But this was Raidou's house, and if he couldn't put Raidou's life back together, he could at least try to return his house to some semblance of normal. Broken counters and all. He told himself Raidou'd appreciate it, when he came back.

It was Suzume who came back, though, slamming the bedroom door behind her and stalking scowling into the kitchen. "Pig-headed idiot!" she snarled, joining Genma at the sink. "He can't get himself killed, so he decides not to live..."

"Did he tell you that?" Genma wrung out the dripping rag and tossed it at the back of the sink. "Did he speak?"

She snorted. "He doesn't have to talk to let me know what kind of idiot he is. Look, Genma, you're looking after him, aren't you? Is it suicide watch?"

Genma shook his head. "They may be calling it that, but he won't kill himself. Not...that way, at any rate. He's suspended until further notice, though."

Suzume's voice dropped. "Did you see the report, from his last mission?"

"Got the kid at the mission desk to show me." He hadn't even needed to argue much, though technically a jounin's missions were highly classified; he'd just pointed out to the kid that he'd read that report _anyway_, legally or not, and it'd make things a lot easier if the kid just gave him the report now instead of forcing Genma to do what he'd spent his life doing... "Mission of that caliber should've been easy for him. Only reason he came back is he's too good _not_ to take down guys like that, even when he's not trying."

"Idiot," Suzume said, and sighed, and shoved away from the counter. "I've got to get back; I'm teaching a night class on Cryptology at the Academy. Keep me updated, will you? And try to force some of that food down his throat. I'll bring you some stewed kabocha tomorrow."

"I'll pick up a feeding tube from the hospital if all else fails," Genma assured her. She laughed—a little forced, but he appreciated it all the same—and kissed his cheek, and went out.

Genma went hunting for a phone book and the number of a counter-repairman.

-

Raidou came in as the stars were coming out. He seemed a little shaky on his feet, but he hid it well, leaning against the corner of the hallway wall with his arms folded across his chest and his dark eyes unsmiling. "That's my shouchuu," he said. His voice was a little rough. It brought back memories of throats raw from screaming, of too few bandages and too much blood, of races against time. Genma set the open bottle between his knees and leaned back, spreading his arms over the back of the couch.

"It is," he said evenly. His voice, he noted proudly, was not rough or shaky or slurred at all. He'd always held his alcohol better than Raidou. "It's good stuff. You want a glass and ice, or just the bottle?"

Raidou pushed away from the wall, crossed the floor with only a little uncertainty when it came to skirting the coffee table, and dropped down heavily beside Genma on the couch. He took the bottle without a word and tilted his head back. His strong brown throat knotted briefly as he drank. Genma, watching, could barely see the scars from this side at all; except for a little irregularity at the bridge of Raidou's nose, where the scar began, his profile was strong and clean-cut, perfect enough to hurt.

Genma's chest _did _hurt. He took the bottle back and drank in his turn. He could think of nothing to say that didn't seem absurdly trite, or disgustingly insensitive, or simply stupid. Maybe Raidou'd had the right idea. Perhaps silence was best after all.

He couldn't think of a time he'd really seen Raidou grieve before. When they lost comrades on a mission, Raidou was always the one badgering them back to their feet, pulling the shreds of the team together, dragging it back to Konoha by sheer force of muscle and will. When Masanori'd been killed on that mission to Grass, Raidou'd been the one to dog Genma's tracks from bar to bar to bar, to drag him out of the gutter and haul him home and clean him up. When his wife'd lost the first baby, and then the second, Raidou'd been there to hold her, not to weep.

Maybe, Genma thought, Raidou grieved the way he dealt with everything else in his life. The way he'd dealt with his scar, shunning mirrors for months but glancing at every reflective shop window he passed, holding the pain tighter and tighter until the morning he'd snapped, and Genma had found him lying still as death under the icy spray of the ANBU showers. The ANBU called it _breaking_, and the word fit. You went on until you couldn't take it any more, and then you broke, and then you picked up the pieces and fitted them together as best you could, and went on again…

"That first night we talked," Genma said, very quietly. "Really talked. The night you threw a flashlight at my head. I was pretty damn near breaking, and you held me together. Gave me something to focus on—something to swear at—and then something to cling to. Dunno if I can count how many times you've done that for me, since."

Far too many for him to _want _to count. They were ninja; the bad memories of blood and pain and darkness always outnumbered the good. But somehow, whenever Raidou'd been there, those dark memories turned a little lighter. When Raidou said things would be _all right, _sometimes Genma had had to laugh, because they were staring death in the face, and surely there was no way they could get out of this alive, let alone _all right. _But he'd believed, all the same. And somehow, when the two of them were together, Raidou was right.

"You said once," Genma said, lacing his hands between his knees and staring down at the scarred, knobbly knuckles, "that the stupidest thing you knew was when a guy'd been through hell, and had friends willing to pull him out of it, and wouldn't let them." Or something to that effect. Shouchuu and time made the memory foggy. Good gods, was that really nine years ago? Surely he'd never been so young and stupid…

"I said a lot of things back then." Raidou sounded far older than twenty-nine, an eternity old and tired. "Not all of 'em were worth remembering."

"That one was," Genma said. "Same with what you said back in Heigen. _We're ANBU. We make it out. _Still. Always."

He glanced sideways, just in time to see Raidou's fingers slip around the neck of the half-empty bottle. It fell between his knees, tipping over on the floor, and the straw-pale liquid soaked into the carpet. Raidou didn't glance down. His dark eyes had narrowed in that old, furious scowl, and his voice was tight and raw with anger.

"And you know what that means? It means we leave the rest of them behind. We make it through, and we're battered and beat up but okay—and the people we're supposed to _protect, _they're the ones whose corpses we burn. I swore I'd love and cherish and protect her till I died, Genma, and it only took me five years to _kill _her!"

"You didn't kill her," Genma snapped. "I was there in the hospital, too. She miscarried, and then she got infected; her heart failed. There was nothing the doctors could do, and certainly nothing _you _could have done. Listen, Rai—sometimes—"

Raidou wasn't listening. "When she lost the first baby, the doctors told her it'd be even more dangerous to try again. But she knew how much I wanted—and I wasn't careful enough; _I _wanted that child so badly I let her persuade me it'd be all right, and it wasn't. She lost it, and it killed her…"

The anger drained out of his voice, leaving only a numb grief behind. "I didn't love her enough."

Genma bit his tongue, strangling back the words that leapt to his teeth. _You loved her more than you loved me, _for one—and what good would that do? He laid his hands carefully over his knees, folding his fingers down one by one. "You loved her. She knew it."

"If I loved her enough, I would've told her no!" Raidou flashed out, throwing his head up. His eyes glittered dangerously; it might have been from tears. "If I'd cared more about her safety than I cared about—about anything, I would've have let her."

"If you'd cared more about her safety than you'd cared about her, you mean?" Genma asked dangerously.

Raidou caught the tone, if not the meaning. His clenched hand opened a little. "That doesn't—"

"It makes more sense than you do," Genma said. "_Listen _to yourself! You're talking like you're the only one whose choices could possibly make any difference. You think _she _didn't want that child for herself? You think her arms didn't ache for the baby she lost? You think, when she sobbed her heart out on your shoulder, she was only crying for you?"

The other man was silent, head drooping down to stare at his hands. Genma's chest clenched painfully tight, but he pressed on. "She wanted a child as badly as you did. Maybe more, to go through with what she did. It was _her choice, _not yours. And in saying you should've protected her from it—what would you have done, wrapped her up in silk and put her on a shelf? Dammit, Raidou, she wasn't a doll, she was your wife. She wasn't a ninja, but she was human, and she had the right to make choices for herself. Maybe it was the wrong choice, but it was hers. And if you take that from her, you're taking the last dignity she had."

He dared at last to reach out, for the first time since that afternoon he'd come to the hospital to find Raidou sitting in silent, frozen agony beside an empty bed. Raidou's shoulder shuddered under his touch, but he didn't pull away.

"She loved you," Genma said, gently. "But she didn't do it for you. And you can convince yourself you should've protected her from her _life, _or you can accept she knew her risks and made her choices, same as you do every day. Same as she did when she chose you."

Raidou made an odd, husky noise. His shoulders hitched forward, shuddered, and he pressed the heels of his hands to his face. "I loved her," he whispered, and the tears were in his voice. "Genma, I loved her so much…"

"Hssh." Genma edged closer, wrapped his arm around Raidou's shoulders, and pulled him in. "I know. So did she. It'll be all right."

And somehow, with Raidou weeping at last, he thought it might be.


End file.
